Building new ways to get information to readers

There are many factors that got us to where we are, but the fact of the matter is that a significant portion of the population does not want to engage with traditional news organizations. Reporters Without Borders found that, in a less-than-two-month span, Donald Trump insulted, attacked, or threatened the press more than 100 times — and that not counting his social media posts. The January 6 riot featured someone writing “Murder The Media” on the Capitol doors. J.D. Vance rallies regularly saw attendees boo members of the press who were called on to ask questions.

A 2019 Pew study found that the more someone approved of Trump, the more they believed the media had low ethical standards.

When audiences don’t trust the most reputable newsrooms, and the incoming administration is incapable of embarrassment, it means the way we cover the highest branches of government has to change.

But I’m more concerned with what it means at the local and community levels. The way that people voted on policy in 2024 didn’t always align with party. In Missouri, for example, liberal policy initiatives such as protecting abortion rights, raising the minimum wage to $15, and guaranteeing paid sick leave for workers were successful, all while the Republicans who campaigned against those proposals dominated by a large margin.

Ballot initiatives are a way for voters to tell us how they want to shape the things that directly impact their lives. These issues, along with a host of questions that keep people up at night — how to afford the price of groceries, how to care for aging loved ones, how to apply for their preferred school district — cannot go unaddressed. People still need information, even if they aren’t attracted to consuming, and in some cases are intentionally shutting off, what has traditionally been called news.

Information allows us to make the best decisions for ourselves and our families. There are three areas I see as opportunities:

• Partnerships with community groups: From a product and format perspective, I’d be investing in longform, deep-dive guides on the concerns we know our audiences need help solving. This moment opens the gate for non-newsroom community groups to become larger sharers of information. It would be smart for news organizations to find strategic partnerships that combine expertise, community trust, and content creation skills. URL Media is doing some interesting work in this area.
• Information paired with personalization: A lot of people are feeling disempowered to make an impact right now, and I predict we’ll be seeing more folks grasp for a feeling of control in their personal lives. When the Health app on your iPhone serves up your data points and trends, there are often articles on each page. These articles help you make sense of your own data. One thing you’ll notice: a lack of sources. If you’re looking at your sleep data and you click on “Why Sleep Is So Important,” you won’t see a researcher attributed or a doctor quoted. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and I think, somewhat ironically from what we are taught in journalism school, that the absence of sources makes it feel more rooted in fact and less opinionated. Newsrooms could test articles written with more authority, stating fact as fact, to see if there’s a compelling difference for the audience.
• Collaborative documents: The last few years of my life have been overtaken by becoming a parent, and my village of other parents of young kids involves a lot of Google Doc sharing. “Oh, don’t waste time researching, I’ll send you my doc,” my friend says of potty-training techniques as we attempt to keep our children from running out of the park. At a happy hour, I beg for my fellow moms to spare themselves and use what I’d learned about applying for pre-K during a recent insomnia session. What would it look like to do this at a larger scale? Could readers leave comments and add links alongside the writers?

This moment will inevitably require newsrooms, and journalists, to change. But when hasn’t that been the case?